oo88The Weekly Poll88oo
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Hiya everyone, and welcome to another Weekly poll!
I'm Drawer32, the host and today we'll be sharing our opinions about what makes a drawing.


Enjoy the Poll!


/Drawer32

I don't think any one aspect makes a drawing. I think it takes all of them together to make a great drawing. It also depends on different styles....somebody may do drawings with very little shading, but enought detail to make them simply beautiful....others may rely on good shading to give their drawings depth. I personally try not to lean any direction and just let the pencil take me where it wants to.

I've voted "other" - and I'd like to take the opportunity to explain why.

People think about the outline, shading, colour/values, concept, and details - but one area that is frequently neglected is the big relationships of the shapes, yet I think this is the one aspect which more generally determines the difference between the professional/accomplished drawing and that of the beginner than any other. I'm not just talking about formulaic "proportions" here, but about getting the big shapes and forms right, for the specific pose/scene.

Here's an article I wrote on this issue for another site:

Spatial frequency, composition, and likeness

I'd like to introduce, and discuss, the concept of spatial frequency, in relation to art.



The dot on the left here shows a step in value at its edge which abruptly goes from white to black - the is described as "high spatial frequency"
The dot on the right, however, changes in a way which is much more gradual and spread over a much greater distance, and area - such a feature is described as "low spatial frequency".

Now we can use this concept to think about several issues of concern to artists, such as:

• Painterly vs Tight
• Line vs Mass
• Composition
• Proportions and likeness.

I see a lot of people concentrating on detail, and then wondering why their painting has poor composition, or why they have failed to capture likeness. I suspect that this is often because they are not aware of the importance of working in, and thinking about, the low spatial frequency range.


If we look at Ingres "Madame Moitessier" (1856), it is typical of a "classical" painting style, being "tight", with lots of fine linear detail




- but he also gets the low-spatial frequency information correct too - the painting is still striking - has a good composition - when seen from a distance, and blurred:




Nature is fractal - it shows a similar level of intricacy at different scales - we turn the magnification up, and the level of intricacy appears to remain constant.

We thus are attuned naturally to find attractive, images which replicate this scaling phenomenon, at least across some range of scales.

This is why some paintings look interesting from across the room, even before we can make out what they actually are. This can be thought of in terms of being good abstract composition.

Here's another painting with that "across the room" thing going for it:



Sargent's "Wertheimer Children" 1902 - again, it's got a bold composition...

and when we get closer, we see



but if we get closer than the ideal viewing distance from these two paintings, we see something interesting in the comparison:



because we can see that the Ingres is painted in precise minute painstaking detail, while the Sargent turns out to be constructed from a series of bold sweeping brushstrokes, with very little in the way of detail.

The "promise" of the next level of detail becoming apparent as we get closer, pulls us in towards a painting - and with a "tight" painting like the Ingres, we can get a lot closer than the "optimal viewing distance for the whole painting" and still keep resolving new detail (like the real world).

However, for the Sargent, we discover that as we get closer than the "optimal", those areas which looked entirely consistent with containing more detail turn out instead to break down into blobs and splotches - which is surprising - and is what is generally called "painterly" - what Sargent has done is approach the image fundamentally from the low-spatial-frequency end, and pushed the spatial frequencies up just enough to be convincing at the optimal viewing distance, or slightly closer. Now this approach can be seen as very efficient, because Sargent gives us just enough to be convincing, without spending a lot of time on painting detail which is unnecessary - however, it works because Sargent has a very solid understanding of this aspect of "the big picture" - low spatial frequency.

This also relates to soft edges, and differential focus in relation to retinal visual acuity. (The Sargent better mimics the way we see, whereas the Ingres is hyperreal).

It's probably a reason why those who draw in tight detail, or with line, sometimes have difficulties in adapting to painting - as they are approaching it from the outset with a high-spatial-frequency mindset.

One might also add that this approach gives some insight onto why abstract painting is sometimes boring, as it's insufficiently fractal - one gets closer, and finds there's nothing new to see, after only one or two levels.

One of the ideas that I'm trying to get across here is that the ideal image has data across a wide range of the spatial frequency spectrum, but that it's the middle to low end where people perhaps ought to be concentrating their efforts - this range is more important to composition:



and to general proportions and likeness:



than is high spatial frequency (or in more usual artistic terminology, fine detail).

Now part of this is getting away from the idea that the large-scale stuff is just a "rough" preparation for the fine detail - but that the earliest stages of composition, proportions, and block-in require just as much, if not more attention (and a preparedness to stand well back) than the final touches of (high-spatial frequency) detail.


Dave

I voted other, or maybe I could put it as "Most of the above"?
Gee, Dave, that is very informative. thank you for sharing that with us.

What makes a drawing ?- Here is the dry definition:(note-the question doesn't ask "What makes a good/bad/artistic drawing"), so, a drawing is a mark or collection of marks with some implement on some substrate intended to represent an object, idea or concept graphically. Without the concept, no drawing would be made, so concept gets my vote.
But drawings are made for a wide variety of reasons: if you are a draftsman, someone handed you a page of specifications which you translated graphically; if you are a mathematician, you draw lines in shapes to represent your equations; if you are an artist you create a drawing to represent what you see or imagine; etc.

John

Hi Dave….great response, if I understand you correctly you are using the black and white illustration to define composition, and accuracy, in reproduction, the premise is one of illustrating the fact that as artists we should look at a range of depths in our work and not focus on only capturing the detail in the drawing. I am talking purely from a drawing point of view; I know your illustration uses paintings.

The psychology of drawing is one of my favorite subjects and it is great to have another artists input on the subject. The black and white illustration does represent spatial frequency, but I think that the other areas you are covering are slightly more complicated than the illustration suggests.

I totally agree with you, in that to create exceptional drawings you need to be aware of not only trying to capture the subject, The artist also needs to understand what I would refer to as the hidden elements of drawing, i.e. what is taking place at an emotional and psychological level.

To use your example of the two black dots on the paper, the dot on the left is closer to the viewer than the dot on the right, the dot on the left has a totally different emotional content to the dot on the right. And again the dot on the left is static whilst the dot on the right has energy. Emotionally the dot on the right is contained, restrained with defined edges whilst the dot on the right has freedom to expand.

Understanding the marks we make when we draw, is often more important than the finished drawing,

Great comment……Regards Wayneo

Fantastic stuff, Dave -- thanks for providing words for some formless thoughts of my own.

John, I like how you really got into this question and gave a fully fleshed out answer. Thank you for giving me some brain fodder.

Brain Fodder ? is that what you call it lol

maybe mental floss? LOL

everything that was listed was what drawing may or may not consist of, but most of the time when people draw its to express emotion so i think that the emotion involved is what makes it because in some way or another thats what drives us all to draw in the first place.

in fact my opinion choose the colors it dose make the drawing...

Hello, I'm finally back, my internet was down .

Maybe it's because I'm in the process of learning to shade and my drawings are getting a lot better, bur I think that the shading is the most important part...the one that defines the drawing.

I would suggest you read :
KANDINSKY : Punkt und linie zu Flache. Translated in french : Point et ligne sur plan.
Most probably the book has been translated in english.
An

also :
Paul Klee : Théorie de l'art moderne, translated from german.

I always thought it was a pencil Or pen in someone's hand that did it :